Ceniza, our little gray kitty, is not with us any more. She was put to sleep yesterday after being diagnosed with kidney failure.
Late last week Luther noticed that she didn't seem herself. She hadn't been eating or drinking and she moved slowly and gingerly. So Saturday morning he took her in to Kitty Klinic. The blood test results showing kidney function were off the charts. He brought her home again until I got home from flute choir practice. We waited around for Steve, who was coming by to pick up our old wireless router, and found out from him where the emergency vet was. Meanwhile, Ceniza didn't move around much. We just tried to keep her warm. We couldn't justify letting her try to get through one more night, so we went.
Luther and I answered the ad I had found in Methodist Hospital's weekly employee newsletter on January 16, 1991, the day the first bombs of the Gulf War fell on Baghdad. The people offering the free kitties had the TV on, so, while we picked out our kitty, we could see the newsies covering the bombing. Luther (who can remember it better than I can) says Tom Brokaw (I think) had just gotten Walter Cronkite, of all people, out of bed to get his take on the situation. He was barely awake and had no idea what was going on. The people in the house smoked, and the smell of cigarette smoke was oddly compatible with all the bombing going on on the TV. I can't remember how many kitties there were, but, of the ones not spoken for, we saw one that didn't rough-and-tumble with the rest. She looked shy and cute. So we picked her. And we named her Ceniza for her color, and for the apocalyptic atmosphere of that night.
Ceniza's talents included the ability to say "beer!" and "what!?." She possessed a hypnotic purr. In one famous incident, Franklin Curbelo, attending a meeting at our house, heard her purring and said, in his thick Argentinian accent, "Eeet eeez making me sleeeeeepyyy."
We will miss having to jump up from the bed upon discovering that we have sat on the spot where she was sleeping comfortably under the covers. We will miss having to coax her the rest of the way down the stairs in the evenings after she has announced her presence by squeaking "what!?" from the landing. Of course, she was so shy that not many people besides us ever actually saw her. However, in the last month or so she was even becoming comfortable enough to watch TV in the living room with M&D, even if Luther and I weren't around. And she always recognized and responded to the voice of Luther's sister Deb who seems to be part cat herself.
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2 comments:
Only correction to the day we picked up Ceniza, it was Dan Rather who had succeeded Walter Cronkite on CBS and probably felt privileged enough to wake him up.
Only thing to add is we kidded that we should lease Ceniza out to people who were down in the dumps, as we could always count on some Cenizaterapi, hours on end of purring in our lap or on our chest when we napped, to set us right when we were depressed. I figured out once she was gone that all those times she came bounding to Jo and me so insistently, it wasn't to call attention to herself, but to remind us she would give her unqualified attention to Jo or me.
We are so sad. The kids never got a chance to get to know Ceniza because by the time they came along, she had become shy. But I remember the summers when I was in High School, I used to stay in the 2nd floor room by the bathroom and Ceniza would come in and hang out with me on my bed before I fell asleep. What a sweet sweet kitty!
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